Antique Medical Equipment

Cooling Boards and Corpse Coolers

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 The Cooling Board: Furniture for the Interval Before Burial A perforated plank or cane-lattice platform, often folding for the travelling undertaker, with ice set beneath — the simplest instrument in the whole trade, and pure thermodynamics rather than chemistry.
    2. Vol 2 The Corpse Cooler and the Ice Casket The metal ice-box that chilled the dead before refrigeration — from a box of ice over the breast to John Gravenstine's patented casket-on-ice — how it worked, why it was dangerous, and why it was only ever a stopgap.
    3. Vol 3 From Ice to the Cold Room How mechanical refrigeration and the metal embalming table displaced the cooling board and the ice-packed cooler in the twentieth century — and where the old ice-and-barn practice survived longest, in the frozen-ground receiving vault and the Appalachian winter hold.
    4. Vol 4 Makers, Patents, and the Trade-Catalog Record The paper trail behind the cooling board and the corpse cooler — the patent family from the 1846 corpse refrigerator to the 1880 folding cooling board, the ice-casket makers around John Gravenstine, the undertakers' supply catalogs, and the construction cues by which a surviving object is dated.
    5. Vol 5 Collecting Cooling Boards, Coolers, and Ice Caskets The object on the shelf: how a surviving cooling board, corpse cooler, or ice casket is dated by joinery, cane versus plank, cast fittings, and folding hardware — and how provenance, condition, and display turn a grim curiosity into a documented artefact of the pre-refrigeration trade.